Attorney General Jeff Sessions has brought Cook into his inner circle at the Justice Department, appointing him to be one of his top lieutenants to help undo the criminal justice policies of Obama and former attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr. As Sessions has traveled to different cities to preach his tough-on-crime philosophy, Cook has been at his side.

Sessions has yet to announce specific policy changes, but Cook’s new perch speaks volumes about where the Justice Department is headed.

Law enforcement officials say that Sessions and Cook are preparing a plan to prosecute more drug and gun cases and pursue mandatory minimum sentences. The two men are eager to bring back the national crime strategy of the 1980s and ’90s from the peak of the drug war, an approach that had fallen out of favor in recent years as minority communities grappled with the effects of mass incarceration.

Crime is near historic lows in the United States, but Sessions says that the spike in homicides in several cities, including Chicago, is a harbinger of a “dangerous new trend” in America that requires a tough response.

“Our nation needs to say clearly once again that using drugs is bad,” Sessions said to law enforcement officials in a speech in Richmond last month. “It will destroy your life.”

Advocates of criminal justice reform argue that Sessions and Cook are going in the wrong direction — back to a strategy that tore apart families and sent low-level drug offenders, disproportionately minority citizens, to prison for long sentences…

But sentencing reform advocates say the tough crime policies went too far. The nation began incarcerating people at a higher rate than any other country — jailing 25 percent of the world’s prisoners at a cost of $80 billion a year. The nation’s prison and jail population more than quadrupled from 500,000 in 1980 to 2.2 million in 2015, filled with mostly black men strapped with lengthy prison sentences — 10 or 20 years, sometimes life without parole for a first drug offense.

As a native son of D.C., these policies did nothing to stop the wave of violence, and most likely made it worse (every time one organization was taken down, another, worse group rose in its place). But this make perfect sense to someone like Jeff Sessions–which is to say, a racist. Unlike Maine governor Paul LePage (don’t worry, I’ll explain in a minute), Jeff Sessions is too cunning to let his racist freak flag fly. But LePage gave away the game last summer (boldface mine):

Asked about the state’s opioid epidemic, he has ended up saying something vulgar or controversial — or both — about the ethnic makeup or sexual intentions of drug dealers.

This week, LePage went for all of the above. The climax of his week-long ‘I’m-not-a-racist’ defense came Thursday, when the governor appeared to threaten a state lawmaker’s life for making that charge (even though the lawmaker denied making the charge to begin with)…

Back in January, LePage was responding to a question about how he has handled the state’s opioid epidemic when he said “guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty” come from New York and Connecticut to sell their heroin in Maine, and “half the time they impregnate a young white girl before they leave.”

LePage added that’s “a real sad thing because then we have another ‘issue’ we have to deal with down the road.” (My emphasis added on ‘issue.’)

LePage later said he meant to say “Maine women” instead of “white women.” He apologized to “Maine women,” but he didn’t back down from his original comment about drug dealers and what they do when they’re in Maine.

LePage first focused on the race of drug dealers in January, when he held a town hall event in Bridgton to promote his legislative agenda and responded to a question about how he was tackling the drug addiction problem. He began talking about how heroin was being brought into Maine by dealers from out of state.

“These are guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty – these types of guys – they come from Connecticut and New York, they come up here, they sell their heroin, they go back home,” LePage said. “Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young white girl before they leave, which is a real sad thing because then we have another issue we have to deal with down the road.”

…“Let me tell you this, explain to you, I made the comment that black people are trafficking in our state, now ever since I said that comment I’ve been collecting every single drug dealer who has been arrested in our state,” LePage said at the event. “I don’t ask them to come to Maine and sell their poison, but they come and I will tell you that 90-plus percent of those pictures in my book, and it’s a three-ringed binder, are black and Hispanic people from Waterbury, Connecticut, the Bronx and Brooklyn.”

You’ll be shocked to learn that ninety percent of the people in LePage’s binder aren’t black or Latino.

But this is how these assholes approach the heroin addiction problem: to the extent white people are involved, it’s shifty, sleazy black and brown men (who want to sleep with all the white women) who are corrupting the good white people. Never mind that the OxyContin epidemic was extensively white people, from top to bottom. But if you believe what LePage and Sessions do, then a ‘two-approach’ system, where good, rural white people are treated kindly and ‘bad’ corrupting (and corrupt) black and brown are hunted down. It’s also possible to believe this, without considering yourself to be a racist–they’re just ‘telling it is like it is.’ ([cough] OxyContin [cough])